Category: Fiction
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An unseen border
T.Y. EulianoGainesville, Florida, United States “Please let me have the chest pain in 3,” I said. “I can’t take any more whiny kids today.” Clare raised an eyebrow. “You can have the next trauma.” “Two traumas,” she said. “I can’t stand any more whiny parents.” “Deal.” She wrote my initials by Room 3. “Remind me…
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Up north
Richard BentleyAmherst, Massachusetts, United States He had come to Northern Michigan, and the lake gulls were shrieking at him. He had been on vacation only two days, but he sat around the cabin, springing up now and then to go to the window and back. It was too chilly to go out to the beach.…
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How to save a life
Sam CampbellMoh’D IbrahimJohnson City, Tennessee, United States My wife is in Texas, threatening to file divorce papers. I am here, 996 miles away, trying to find Mrs. Smith who has wandered out of her room searching the entire hospital for her dead husband. When I find her on the fourth floor, she asks if I…
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A form of pain
Ifediba NzubePort Harcourt, Nigeria For Yewande, pain is Èsù slapping her head like a bata drum. But no one sees that; they see only a tumor pushing out her left eye, up her palate, and through her nostrils. Most days she smells like meat gone green. The other patients can tolerate the smell but they…
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Three doctor’s visits
Zara AzizBristol, England Only one week ago Yasmin had been at the same flats to see her patient, Jenny Johnson. Jenny was a lovely lady of around fifty-two, with a lilting Irish accent and a penchant for saving stray dogs. But she sometimes missed medication and when she relapsed all hell broke loose. Rumour had…
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Chemo room
Sarah SmithPike Road, Alabama, United States Cancer makes me glad I am fat. Mr. Weiss, two chairs down from Jack and me today, does not agree. Two months ago, Mr. Weiss tried to convince me of the importance of keeping in shape and maintaining a healthy weight. As though I did not know these things. He assumes…
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Jacarandas – a dream
In the year when the Olympic Games were held in Australia, the Jacarandas were in full bloom and their blue blossoms wafted through the air. At the Olympic campus an English boy and an Australian girl fell in love. Every night they would be seen walking through the cool air holding hands. Sometimes they went…
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Butterfly day
Marsal SanchesBismarck, North Dakota, United States He did not believe that a black butterfly was an omen of death. It was just some old superstition he remembered hearing from his Brazilian babysitter many years before, sort of a South American banshee. Someone would see a black butterfly inside the house and, a few hours later,…
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She was even in love with you
Stewart MassadSt. Louis, Missouri, USA Francis Delisle was coming out of Bard’s TrueValue Hardware with ant bait in a paper bag when he saw Marty Van Etten coming up Main Street. Marty’s wife Anne had died at winter’s end, only forty-seven, from glioblastoma, after surgery in Baltimore, radiation in New Haven, chemotherapy in New York.…